Man-Kzin Wars V by Larry Niven (people reading books txt) 📕

once boasted that he had never lifted anything heavier than a booktape, a fork, or a squinch racquet.

"I guess not, Cap'n." Jook shook his head.

"Any time, boy," Krater said into his ear.

"Cut some slack, Lieutenant," Cuiller told her. ". . . And that's not a suggestion."

"Yes, sir." And still she did not relax the position of her limbs.

"Now, Lieutenant! Make space!"

Her hands flexed out of their semi-rigid, thumbs-in shape and her arms came down. Krater pirouetted a half-meter away from the navigator.

"That's better. . . . Sarah, I think you ought to take that 'cycler apart and find out why it's making you sick. Adjust it to your own taste specs, if you like."

"If that means I've got to clean out his shit, Captain—"

"It means you'll tend to the equipment, Lieutenant. Your turn on the roster."

She glared at him, then lifted her chin. "Aye, sir."

"Jook, take station forward and get me a report on our mission profile to date."

"That I can tell you at once. We're only—"

"With a detailed threat analysis, based on all reported contacts logged throughout the Chord. Don't rush yourself. Do it right. Work on saving our asses."

"But, sir! We know the kzinti aren't coming through here. That cyber projection is just—"

"Just the reason we're out here. But I don't want you taking an expert system's analysis on faith. Do your own homework. Down in the library. Move it."

"Aye, Cap'n."

With Jook and Krater moving in different directions, on assignments that would occupy each of them for an hour or more, Cuiller could relax for a bit—unless Gambiel wanted to pick a fight, too. The commander drifted back up to the control yoke.

"Get it all settled?" Gambiel asked.

"Not that it's your business," Cuiller said shortly.

"Sorree!"

* * *

Nyawk-Captain awakened slowly. He spat the rusty taste of fear out of his mouth as soon as his brain had caught up with local reality and he could herd the monkeys back to their secret hiding places.

He checked the navigational repeaters at his station, verifying that Weaponsmaster had not let them drift off course during his watch at helm. No, Cat's Paw was still headed far out into neutral space, away from the network of manned patrols and passive trip-monitors that the humans maintained along their nearer borders with a much-reduced Patriarchy.

The course his ship was following had evolved among the Patriarch's closest strategists. These were kzinti so highly placed that each one had a full name, and it was death ever to speak of them as mere "strategists," even in the aggregate. Except that they and their counsels were secret, and thus Nyawk-Captain and his crewmates could not know their names, and so could never speak of them. Clever.

Their plan, like its origins, was a similarly constructed puzzle, a series of boxes within boxes for the humans to discover and open. This was not perhaps as satisfying for Nyawk-Captain and the other kzinti as a scream and a leap, nor as honorable as one massive attack. But it was more likely to win results under the current circumstances.

A plan almost worthy of Hanuman.

Cat's Paw and three other similarly enhanced interceptors were moving secretly out into space that the humans had not yet explored. There, unobserved, each would soon turn and find its own path back into human space. Each would pass through a different sector, and the timing of their entries would be staggered, too, just enough to appear to human strategists as individual attacks. The humans would dismiss these transits as the movement of renegade kzinti, secret traders and raiders, and so not responsible to the Patriarchy and the humiliating papers that had been signed after Most Recent War.

Each interceptor would make an isolated attack against a single human world. The Paw at Margrave, the others simultaneously at Gummidgy, Canyon, and Silvereyes. With the new weapons they now carried, they could do a massive amount of planetary damage. Of course, the Paw would have to move very quickly through the Lambda Serpentis system—and find the Margravians very much asleep—if they were to be successful and still escape with their lives into deep space on the far side of the system.

But escape was not important. Survival was not important. Timing was everything.

The suddenness and brutality of the attacks would awaken the humans' highest strategists to a possible military action. But an action falling where? To meet it, the humans would spread their fleet. "Trying to cover all the bases" was the human phrase his orders had referenced. It had the smell of a sports term, and true kzinti did not practice sports.

While the humans dispatched their ships and spent their resources investigating and healing the four damaged worlds, the kzinti Last Fleet would be riding behind only one of the interceptors. Just how far depended on the humans' calculated reaction time and the reports of brave kzinti agents among the survivors on those shattered worlds. When human strength was at maximum dispersal, the Last Fleet would overwhelm the patrol screen, engulf the target planet, consolidate, and move on. The fleet would take two, three, perhaps even four key colony worlds before the humans could regroup and mount a defense. But by that time momentum and purpose would be riding with the kzinti. Confusion and alarm would be hindering the humans.

As a plan it was flawless.

As an actual attack, it just might work.

But timing would be everything.

* * *

On the seventy-first day, and twenty-four light-years into the unknown . . .

Uncharted but not unknown, Cuiller reminded himself. A thousand, a million times over the millennia, humankind had looked outward toward this sector and seen its stars—stars now hidden in the Callisto's Blind Spot. Some of these stars, judging by their lines in the mass pointer, were even bright enough to be visible from Earth. But no one had taken a survey mission through here. Not after bumping into the kzinti coming the other way.

"Captain . . ." from Jook at the comm down by the pointer. "We're going to graze the singularity